Dr Scott Masson | Tyndale University (original) (raw)
Papers by Dr Scott Masson
Romanticism, Hermeneutics and the Crisis of the Human Sciences, 2017
Romanticism, Hermeneutics and the Crisis of the Human Sciences, 2016
Romanticism, Hermeneutics and the Crisis of the Human Sciences, 2016
The plan of education delineated in Milton's tract 'Of Education,' in its tacit acknowledgement o... more The plan of education delineated in Milton's tract 'Of Education,' in its tacit acknowledgement of the necessity of cultivating common sense through an appeal to the senses, displays just how profoundly the emphases of Greek philosophy and Christian theology on a correspondence between two worlds continued to pervade the thinking of the late-Renaissance mind: The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright... But because oiu: understanding cannot in this body foimd itself but on sensible things nor arrive so clearly to the knowledge of God and things invisible as by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature, the same method is necessarily to be followed in all discreet teaching.' The traditional focus of the humanities, the study of man in respect to his person and in particular to his words and deeds in light of the world to come as a secondary means of knowing more about God and about truth formed a significant part of Western education until the Enlightenment. However, since the time that GaUleo discovered with his telescope, contrary to its appearance to the naked eye, that the universe revolved around the sim rather than the earthentailing that the worid and everything in it must be in an inpercq)tible state of motion-the answer to the metaphysical question that Aristotle posed has taken on a revolutionary turn. Galileo's discovery has effects that resonate throughout the modem age, even if it went largely unheralded at the time and hardly captured the popular imagination as his demonstration of felling bodies fi-om the tower of Pisa did. 'Since a babe was bom in a manger, it may be doubted whether so great a thing has happened with so little stir.'' For not only did it suggest that the senses were utterly unreliable as a means of accessing the invisible realm of truth through their visible proxy, it also brought into doubt everything and everyone that lay within the earthly sphere, fi-om laws to institutions to human relations. It did so by demonstrating that the same sort of force moved heavenly bodies as affected terrestrial objects. John Donne poignantly notes the impotence of the 'old philosophy' in countering the new universal philosophy and records the resultant decline in belief in the testimony of the world of appearances: And new Philosophy cals all in doubt ITie Element of fire is quite put out; The Sunne is lost, and Ih'earth, and no mans wit Can well direct him, where to looke for it. And fireely men confesse, that this world's spent. When in the Planets, and the Firmament JohnMUtoa'OfEducatioa' Anenpagitica and Other Prose Works. (1941). 44. A.N. Whitehead. Science and the Modem World. (1967). 2. 'things invisible' changed.Arendt observes an aspect of Cartesianism often unacknowledged by histories of philosophy: What has come to an end is the basic distinction between the sensory and the suprasensory, together with the notion, at least as old as Parmenides, that whatever is not given to the senses-God or Being or the First Principles and Causes (archai) or the Ideas-is more real, more truthfiil, more meaningfiil than what appears, that it is not just beyond sense perception but above the world of the senses. What is "dead" is not only the localization of such "eternal truths" but also the distinction itself... (However) the sensory, as still understood by the positivists, cannot survive the death of the suprasensory. No one knew this better than Nietzsche, who, with his poetic and metaphoric description of the assassination of God, has caused so much confusion in these matters. In a significant passage in The Twilight of the Idols, he clarifies what the word "God" meant in the earher story. It was merely a symbol for the suprasensory realm as imderstood by metaphysics; he now uses, instead of "God," the expression "true world" and says: "We have abolished the true world. What has remained? The apparent one perhaps? Oh no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one."" The loss of the true world and the apparent world have left a rather odd legacy, a legacy that has been somewhat masked by the feet that certain basic terms of human knowledge have survived the destruction of the old two-world view. They are however otherwise unrecognisable as their earher terms of reference. As was the case with the term velocity which is present in the xmiverse and compared to \diich earth-bound time or space or movement or speed are only 'relative.' Everything happening on earth has become relative since the earth's relatedness to the universe became the point of reference for all measurements.^ Ricoeur's account of the development of hermeneutics relays a different story. As a result of his tendency to understand meaning in the universal terms of 'timeless' or absolute truth he is led to explain, as we shall see, the original attempt of Romantic hermeneutics to recover meaning as a project without an estabhshed 'ontological' basis, i.e. a basis in truthclaims. This lack of a basis for truth-claims at the centre of the Romantic hermeneutic project ultimately brought their claim to be meaningfiil into question. This was, he says, only corrected by the reorientation of hermeneutics towards a universal model of truth, in the model provided by Heidegger. Prior to Heidegger's correction, this inversion of truth and meaning under a universal perspective created a fimdamental divide between the processes of what Dilthey had called ejq)lanation (the scientific process of accessing truth) and imderstanding (the humanities' process of accessing meaning) within the ostensibly imified method of general hermeneutics. Claims for poetry's meaning could be made by means of a 'Romantic' hermeneutics, but claims for truth remained in the domain of science. The claims of poetry were judged to be nothing but inferior truth-claims. Dilthey's development of the Geisteswissenschaften was based on an attempt to rectify that and, by modelling itself on the Naturwissenschaften, to H&HS. 4344. Martin Heidegger. SeinundZeit 95. (my translation and itahcs; hereafter S&Z) Good synopses of their hermeneutics are provided in the Continental Philosophy of the 20th Century. Ed. Richard Kearney. (1994). 290-349; Gerald Bruns. Hermeneutics Ancient & Modem. (1993); Anthony Thiselton. New Horizons in Hermeneutics: The Theory and Practice of Tran^ormins Biblical Reading. (1992). Kurt Mueller-Vollmer's also has an excellent introduction in his The Hermenentics Reader (1994). ...the central problematic of modem philosophy itself^ namely, the 'epistemological' problem of how an isolated subjectivity, closed in upon itself, can none the less manage to 'transcend' itself in such a way as to achieve a 'knowledge' of the 'external world.'" Gadamer claims that what Heidegger accomphshed was to give 'the human sciences a completely new backgroimd by making science's concept of objectivity appear to be a special case.''" Before moving on to a more extensive critical analysis of Gadamer's hermeneutics, I will first provide a brief synopsis of some of the issues that arise in it. It seems important, given the continued presence of the aporia in contemporary hermeneutics, to introduce a 'case study' of how Gadamer explains the conflict between two different conceptions of hermeneutics leading up to the Romantic period, because it affects the interpretation of the problem thereafter. Kant's subjective turn in philosophy and his redefinition of several words that were central to the previous understandings of interpretation are central to that subsequent discussion. A history of modem hermeneutics, using Paul Ricoeur as its guide, provides that. A case study: Gadamer on Kant and moral sense philosophy While Heidegger traced the problem of the Enlightenment methodology back to Descartes (and specifically to the Cartesian cogito), Gadamer concentrates more on the implicit systematic structuring of Cartesian thinking upon the thinking of the humanities by the late Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant. Gadamer's enqjhases in Truth and Method, as we shall see more clearly later, Ue in three areas: the aesthetic sphere, the historical sphere and the sphere of language. Language is the current running throughout the three, but it is Kant's treatment of aesthetics that Gadamer initially focuses on and which particularly marks his own work as well. Before elaborating on that, it will be usefiilto recapitulate the argument Gadamer makes about how Kant's sense of aesthetics confronted ' that of his contemporaries, who essentially argued from the other side of the hermeneutic divide where the issues of hermeneutics were still based around textual 'regions.' 2^ Rnntledge History. 298. Paul Crowther poses Kant's problem for us in ethical terms: 'ij^^cmi^ assertion of bur subjective response lay claim to a priori, as opposed to merely pnvate, vahdity? Ihe Kantian Sublimf Fmm Morality to Art. (1989). 60. 2«Hans-Georg Gadamer. TrafiL&^Qd. (1989). 258-59. (Hereafter IM© ''T&M 31. Kant refers to taste as a critical faculty 'which in its reflective act takes account (a priori) of the mode of representation of every one else, in order, as it were, to weigh its judgement with the collective reason of mankind, and diereby avoid the illusion arising from subjective and personal conditions which could readily be taken for objective, an illusion that would exert a prejudicial influence upon its judgement' CoJ, 151. CoJ, vii.
The Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization, 2011
Christianity developed as Jesus had prophesied, like a vast tree from a mustard seed. What had on... more Christianity developed as Jesus had prophesied, like a vast tree from a mustard seed. What had once appeared to be a Jewish sect in a backwater of the Roman Empire became a global religion with vast cultural influence over the course of two millennia. Romanticism appeared some 18 centuries later. The organic motif was a favorite one for it, but no longer because it was ensured an automatic resonance with an agrarian society. On the contrary, as the English poet William Wordsworth noted in his 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, in his day there was an “increasing accumulation of men in cities,” and with them and their uniformity of occupation, a subsequent “craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies” to which “life and manners” have sadly conformed. William Blake's poem “London” wrote of the “mind-forg'd manacles” he heard everywhere in that city's “chartered streets”; and in the Preface to his prophetic book Milton, now immortalized in the popular hymn “Jerusalem,” he wrote of “England's mountains green” beset with “dark Satanic mills.” Keywords: romanticism, Christianity and; romanticism, appearing 18 centuries later; blake's poem “london” of “mind-forg’d manacles”; twin appeals to nature, of the romantic movement
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2009
The Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization, 2011
Christianity developed as Jesus had prophesied, like a vast tree from a mustard seed. What had on... more Christianity developed as Jesus had prophesied, like a vast tree from a mustard seed. What had once appeared to be a Jewish sect in a backwater of the Roman Empire became a global religion with vast cultural influence over the course of two millennia. Romanticism appeared some 18 centuries later. The organic motif was a favorite one for it, but no longer because it was ensured an automatic resonance with an agrarian society. On the contrary, as the English poet William Wordsworth noted in his 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, in his day there was an “increasing accumulation of men in cities,” and with them and their uniformity of occupation, a subsequent “craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies” to which “life and manners” have sadly conformed. William Blake's poem “London” wrote of the “mind-forg'd manacles” he heard everywhere in that city's “chartered streets”; and in the Preface to his prophetic book Milton, now immortalized in the popular hymn “Jerusalem,” he wrote of “England's mountains green” beset with “dark Satanic mills.” Keywords: romanticism, Christianity and; romanticism, appearing 18 centuries later; blake's poem “london” of “mind-forg’d manacles”; twin appeals to nature, of the romantic movement
The Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization, 2011
The Keats-Shelley Review, 2001
A few patrons of the arts in the NorthEast were fortunate enough to see Shelley's rarely performe... more A few patrons of the arts in the NorthEast were fortunate enough to see Shelley's rarely performed play The Cenci between 22-26 May staged at the People's Theatre in Newcastle. However, they may have left, like I did, feeling somewhat ambivalent about their experience. In short, it was a good amateur production, if not altogether satisfactory for that. My ambivalence watches the play's historical reception. For a piece that doubtless represents Shelley's strongest bid to receive public acclamation, his success was at best limited. It was, on the one hand, the only one of Shelley's published works to have gone into a second edition during his lifetime; on the other hand, despite the fact that the poet toned down the uglier aspects of the play's historical events, it was banned from public performance until its presentation before The Shelley Society in 1886,which contained such literary luminaries as Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. This recent viewing leads one to wonder whether its initial censorship may not have been a blessing in disguise. Censorship can add allure to a work of art, bringing a sense of intrigue that excites the public's curiosity, particularly that of its avant-garde. It may have worked so with critics, who in recent years have interpreted the play variously as an example of Shelley's anti-authoritarianism, as a prophesy of incipient Italian nationalism or, more straightforwardly, as an attack on organised religion. Yet attention to the play's relative lack of attention need not necessarily act as a corrective to a work's obscurity. So it is with this play. For while The Cenci is doubtless a dramatic work, it maintains a sense characteristic of Shelley's writing of being a vehicle for generic, amoral ideas firmly resistant to the particular conventions of genre. In this play, it expresses itself in characters who would attract our sympathies through their suffering were it but for the fact that they work to lose it through their own questionable words and deeds. Thus while we are presented with a landscape of social decrepitude, we remain without a hint of moral authority to pronounce it decrepit-not even a chorus to provide social commentary. The effect of such a practice seems to be this: the very fact that, as Shelley explained to Peacock, the play was effectively written in order to defy 'any courtesy of
"This collection of essays by researchers on both sides of the Atlantic is centered on a sin... more "This collection of essays by researchers on both sides of the Atlantic is centered on a single theme capable of two main interpretations. First, it is concerned with the role of silence, the sublime and the transcendental. Secondly, it investigates silence as exclusion, suppression and censorship. It offers fresh readings of a wide variety of literary works, from Shelley to Eliza Fenwick. Table of Contents Table of contents: Foreword; Preface by Michael O’Neill; Introduction 1. Mont Blanc’s Revolutionary ‘Voice’: Shelley and the Discourse on the Sublime (Cian Duffy) 2. ‘[W]hate’er these words cannot express’: Transgressive Fictions in Shelley’s ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,’ ‘To a Skylark,” and ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (Mark Sandy) 3. The Existential Crisis in the Silence of Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Scott Masson 4. The ‘Achievements of Genius’: Silence and Female Literary Originality (Fiona Price) 5. Speaking of Dread: Silence and the Sublime in Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy, of The Ruin on the Rock (Sue Chapin) 6. ‘In Mute Extacy’: Communing with history and nature in Mary Shelley’s Valperga (Rachel Woolley) 7. Taking Possession – Romantic Naming in Wordsworth and Southey (Carol Bolton) 8. Singing the Sofa: Mansfield Park and William Cowper (Bharat Tandon) 9. Breaking ‘the Silent Sabbath of the Grave’: Charlotte Smith’s Quiet Gaze at Grief (Amy Billone) 10. Retold Tales and Structured Silences in The Excursion (Sally Bushell) "
Romanticism, Hermeneutics and the Crisis of the Human Sciences, 2016
"This collection of essays by researchers on both sides of the Atlantic is centered on a sin... more "This collection of essays by researchers on both sides of the Atlantic is centered on a single theme capable of two main interpretations. First, it is concerned with the role of silence, the sublime and the transcendental. Secondly, it investigates silence as exclusion, suppression and censorship. It offers fresh readings of a wide variety of literary works, from Shelley to Eliza Fenwick. Table of Contents Table of contents: Foreword; Preface by Michael O’Neill; Introduction 1. Mont Blanc’s Revolutionary ‘Voice’: Shelley and the Discourse on the Sublime (Cian Duffy) 2. ‘[W]hate’er these words cannot express’: Transgressive Fictions in Shelley’s ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,’ ‘To a Skylark,” and ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (Mark Sandy) 3. The Existential Crisis in the Silence of Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Scott Masson 4. The ‘Achievements of Genius’: Silence and Female Literary Originality (Fiona Price) 5. Speaking of Dread: Silence and the Sublime in Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy, of The Ruin on the Rock (Sue Chapin) 6. ‘In Mute Extacy’: Communing with history and nature in Mary Shelley’s Valperga (Rachel Woolley) 7. Taking Possession – Romantic Naming in Wordsworth and Southey (Carol Bolton) 8. Singing the Sofa: Mansfield Park and William Cowper (Bharat Tandon) 9. Breaking ‘the Silent Sabbath of the Grave’: Charlotte Smith’s Quiet Gaze at Grief (Amy Billone) 10. Retold Tales and Structured Silences in The Excursion (Sally Bushell) "
Romanticism, Hermeneutics and the Crisis of the Human Sciences
Romanticism, Hermeneutics and the Crisis of the Human Sciences, 2017
Romanticism, Hermeneutics and the Crisis of the Human Sciences, 2016
Romanticism, Hermeneutics and the Crisis of the Human Sciences, 2016
The plan of education delineated in Milton's tract 'Of Education,' in its tacit acknowledgement o... more The plan of education delineated in Milton's tract 'Of Education,' in its tacit acknowledgement of the necessity of cultivating common sense through an appeal to the senses, displays just how profoundly the emphases of Greek philosophy and Christian theology on a correspondence between two worlds continued to pervade the thinking of the late-Renaissance mind: The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright... But because oiu: understanding cannot in this body foimd itself but on sensible things nor arrive so clearly to the knowledge of God and things invisible as by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature, the same method is necessarily to be followed in all discreet teaching.' The traditional focus of the humanities, the study of man in respect to his person and in particular to his words and deeds in light of the world to come as a secondary means of knowing more about God and about truth formed a significant part of Western education until the Enlightenment. However, since the time that GaUleo discovered with his telescope, contrary to its appearance to the naked eye, that the universe revolved around the sim rather than the earthentailing that the worid and everything in it must be in an inpercq)tible state of motion-the answer to the metaphysical question that Aristotle posed has taken on a revolutionary turn. Galileo's discovery has effects that resonate throughout the modem age, even if it went largely unheralded at the time and hardly captured the popular imagination as his demonstration of felling bodies fi-om the tower of Pisa did. 'Since a babe was bom in a manger, it may be doubted whether so great a thing has happened with so little stir.'' For not only did it suggest that the senses were utterly unreliable as a means of accessing the invisible realm of truth through their visible proxy, it also brought into doubt everything and everyone that lay within the earthly sphere, fi-om laws to institutions to human relations. It did so by demonstrating that the same sort of force moved heavenly bodies as affected terrestrial objects. John Donne poignantly notes the impotence of the 'old philosophy' in countering the new universal philosophy and records the resultant decline in belief in the testimony of the world of appearances: And new Philosophy cals all in doubt ITie Element of fire is quite put out; The Sunne is lost, and Ih'earth, and no mans wit Can well direct him, where to looke for it. And fireely men confesse, that this world's spent. When in the Planets, and the Firmament JohnMUtoa'OfEducatioa' Anenpagitica and Other Prose Works. (1941). 44. A.N. Whitehead. Science and the Modem World. (1967). 2. 'things invisible' changed.Arendt observes an aspect of Cartesianism often unacknowledged by histories of philosophy: What has come to an end is the basic distinction between the sensory and the suprasensory, together with the notion, at least as old as Parmenides, that whatever is not given to the senses-God or Being or the First Principles and Causes (archai) or the Ideas-is more real, more truthfiil, more meaningfiil than what appears, that it is not just beyond sense perception but above the world of the senses. What is "dead" is not only the localization of such "eternal truths" but also the distinction itself... (However) the sensory, as still understood by the positivists, cannot survive the death of the suprasensory. No one knew this better than Nietzsche, who, with his poetic and metaphoric description of the assassination of God, has caused so much confusion in these matters. In a significant passage in The Twilight of the Idols, he clarifies what the word "God" meant in the earher story. It was merely a symbol for the suprasensory realm as imderstood by metaphysics; he now uses, instead of "God," the expression "true world" and says: "We have abolished the true world. What has remained? The apparent one perhaps? Oh no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one."" The loss of the true world and the apparent world have left a rather odd legacy, a legacy that has been somewhat masked by the feet that certain basic terms of human knowledge have survived the destruction of the old two-world view. They are however otherwise unrecognisable as their earher terms of reference. As was the case with the term velocity which is present in the xmiverse and compared to \diich earth-bound time or space or movement or speed are only 'relative.' Everything happening on earth has become relative since the earth's relatedness to the universe became the point of reference for all measurements.^ Ricoeur's account of the development of hermeneutics relays a different story. As a result of his tendency to understand meaning in the universal terms of 'timeless' or absolute truth he is led to explain, as we shall see, the original attempt of Romantic hermeneutics to recover meaning as a project without an estabhshed 'ontological' basis, i.e. a basis in truthclaims. This lack of a basis for truth-claims at the centre of the Romantic hermeneutic project ultimately brought their claim to be meaningfiil into question. This was, he says, only corrected by the reorientation of hermeneutics towards a universal model of truth, in the model provided by Heidegger. Prior to Heidegger's correction, this inversion of truth and meaning under a universal perspective created a fimdamental divide between the processes of what Dilthey had called ejq)lanation (the scientific process of accessing truth) and imderstanding (the humanities' process of accessing meaning) within the ostensibly imified method of general hermeneutics. Claims for poetry's meaning could be made by means of a 'Romantic' hermeneutics, but claims for truth remained in the domain of science. The claims of poetry were judged to be nothing but inferior truth-claims. Dilthey's development of the Geisteswissenschaften was based on an attempt to rectify that and, by modelling itself on the Naturwissenschaften, to H&HS. 4344. Martin Heidegger. SeinundZeit 95. (my translation and itahcs; hereafter S&Z) Good synopses of their hermeneutics are provided in the Continental Philosophy of the 20th Century. Ed. Richard Kearney. (1994). 290-349; Gerald Bruns. Hermeneutics Ancient & Modem. (1993); Anthony Thiselton. New Horizons in Hermeneutics: The Theory and Practice of Tran^ormins Biblical Reading. (1992). Kurt Mueller-Vollmer's also has an excellent introduction in his The Hermenentics Reader (1994). ...the central problematic of modem philosophy itself^ namely, the 'epistemological' problem of how an isolated subjectivity, closed in upon itself, can none the less manage to 'transcend' itself in such a way as to achieve a 'knowledge' of the 'external world.'" Gadamer claims that what Heidegger accomphshed was to give 'the human sciences a completely new backgroimd by making science's concept of objectivity appear to be a special case.''" Before moving on to a more extensive critical analysis of Gadamer's hermeneutics, I will first provide a brief synopsis of some of the issues that arise in it. It seems important, given the continued presence of the aporia in contemporary hermeneutics, to introduce a 'case study' of how Gadamer explains the conflict between two different conceptions of hermeneutics leading up to the Romantic period, because it affects the interpretation of the problem thereafter. Kant's subjective turn in philosophy and his redefinition of several words that were central to the previous understandings of interpretation are central to that subsequent discussion. A history of modem hermeneutics, using Paul Ricoeur as its guide, provides that. A case study: Gadamer on Kant and moral sense philosophy While Heidegger traced the problem of the Enlightenment methodology back to Descartes (and specifically to the Cartesian cogito), Gadamer concentrates more on the implicit systematic structuring of Cartesian thinking upon the thinking of the humanities by the late Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant. Gadamer's enqjhases in Truth and Method, as we shall see more clearly later, Ue in three areas: the aesthetic sphere, the historical sphere and the sphere of language. Language is the current running throughout the three, but it is Kant's treatment of aesthetics that Gadamer initially focuses on and which particularly marks his own work as well. Before elaborating on that, it will be usefiilto recapitulate the argument Gadamer makes about how Kant's sense of aesthetics confronted ' that of his contemporaries, who essentially argued from the other side of the hermeneutic divide where the issues of hermeneutics were still based around textual 'regions.' 2^ Rnntledge History. 298. Paul Crowther poses Kant's problem for us in ethical terms: 'ij^^cmi^ assertion of bur subjective response lay claim to a priori, as opposed to merely pnvate, vahdity? Ihe Kantian Sublimf Fmm Morality to Art. (1989). 60. 2«Hans-Georg Gadamer. TrafiL&^Qd. (1989). 258-59. (Hereafter IM© ''T&M 31. Kant refers to taste as a critical faculty 'which in its reflective act takes account (a priori) of the mode of representation of every one else, in order, as it were, to weigh its judgement with the collective reason of mankind, and diereby avoid the illusion arising from subjective and personal conditions which could readily be taken for objective, an illusion that would exert a prejudicial influence upon its judgement' CoJ, 151. CoJ, vii.
The Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization, 2011
Christianity developed as Jesus had prophesied, like a vast tree from a mustard seed. What had on... more Christianity developed as Jesus had prophesied, like a vast tree from a mustard seed. What had once appeared to be a Jewish sect in a backwater of the Roman Empire became a global religion with vast cultural influence over the course of two millennia. Romanticism appeared some 18 centuries later. The organic motif was a favorite one for it, but no longer because it was ensured an automatic resonance with an agrarian society. On the contrary, as the English poet William Wordsworth noted in his 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, in his day there was an “increasing accumulation of men in cities,” and with them and their uniformity of occupation, a subsequent “craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies” to which “life and manners” have sadly conformed. William Blake's poem “London” wrote of the “mind-forg'd manacles” he heard everywhere in that city's “chartered streets”; and in the Preface to his prophetic book Milton, now immortalized in the popular hymn “Jerusalem,” he wrote of “England's mountains green” beset with “dark Satanic mills.” Keywords: romanticism, Christianity and; romanticism, appearing 18 centuries later; blake's poem “london” of “mind-forg’d manacles”; twin appeals to nature, of the romantic movement
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2009
The Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization, 2011
Christianity developed as Jesus had prophesied, like a vast tree from a mustard seed. What had on... more Christianity developed as Jesus had prophesied, like a vast tree from a mustard seed. What had once appeared to be a Jewish sect in a backwater of the Roman Empire became a global religion with vast cultural influence over the course of two millennia. Romanticism appeared some 18 centuries later. The organic motif was a favorite one for it, but no longer because it was ensured an automatic resonance with an agrarian society. On the contrary, as the English poet William Wordsworth noted in his 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, in his day there was an “increasing accumulation of men in cities,” and with them and their uniformity of occupation, a subsequent “craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies” to which “life and manners” have sadly conformed. William Blake's poem “London” wrote of the “mind-forg'd manacles” he heard everywhere in that city's “chartered streets”; and in the Preface to his prophetic book Milton, now immortalized in the popular hymn “Jerusalem,” he wrote of “England's mountains green” beset with “dark Satanic mills.” Keywords: romanticism, Christianity and; romanticism, appearing 18 centuries later; blake's poem “london” of “mind-forg’d manacles”; twin appeals to nature, of the romantic movement
The Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization, 2011
The Keats-Shelley Review, 2001
A few patrons of the arts in the NorthEast were fortunate enough to see Shelley's rarely performe... more A few patrons of the arts in the NorthEast were fortunate enough to see Shelley's rarely performed play The Cenci between 22-26 May staged at the People's Theatre in Newcastle. However, they may have left, like I did, feeling somewhat ambivalent about their experience. In short, it was a good amateur production, if not altogether satisfactory for that. My ambivalence watches the play's historical reception. For a piece that doubtless represents Shelley's strongest bid to receive public acclamation, his success was at best limited. It was, on the one hand, the only one of Shelley's published works to have gone into a second edition during his lifetime; on the other hand, despite the fact that the poet toned down the uglier aspects of the play's historical events, it was banned from public performance until its presentation before The Shelley Society in 1886,which contained such literary luminaries as Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. This recent viewing leads one to wonder whether its initial censorship may not have been a blessing in disguise. Censorship can add allure to a work of art, bringing a sense of intrigue that excites the public's curiosity, particularly that of its avant-garde. It may have worked so with critics, who in recent years have interpreted the play variously as an example of Shelley's anti-authoritarianism, as a prophesy of incipient Italian nationalism or, more straightforwardly, as an attack on organised religion. Yet attention to the play's relative lack of attention need not necessarily act as a corrective to a work's obscurity. So it is with this play. For while The Cenci is doubtless a dramatic work, it maintains a sense characteristic of Shelley's writing of being a vehicle for generic, amoral ideas firmly resistant to the particular conventions of genre. In this play, it expresses itself in characters who would attract our sympathies through their suffering were it but for the fact that they work to lose it through their own questionable words and deeds. Thus while we are presented with a landscape of social decrepitude, we remain without a hint of moral authority to pronounce it decrepit-not even a chorus to provide social commentary. The effect of such a practice seems to be this: the very fact that, as Shelley explained to Peacock, the play was effectively written in order to defy 'any courtesy of
"This collection of essays by researchers on both sides of the Atlantic is centered on a sin... more "This collection of essays by researchers on both sides of the Atlantic is centered on a single theme capable of two main interpretations. First, it is concerned with the role of silence, the sublime and the transcendental. Secondly, it investigates silence as exclusion, suppression and censorship. It offers fresh readings of a wide variety of literary works, from Shelley to Eliza Fenwick. Table of Contents Table of contents: Foreword; Preface by Michael O’Neill; Introduction 1. Mont Blanc’s Revolutionary ‘Voice’: Shelley and the Discourse on the Sublime (Cian Duffy) 2. ‘[W]hate’er these words cannot express’: Transgressive Fictions in Shelley’s ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,’ ‘To a Skylark,” and ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (Mark Sandy) 3. The Existential Crisis in the Silence of Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Scott Masson 4. The ‘Achievements of Genius’: Silence and Female Literary Originality (Fiona Price) 5. Speaking of Dread: Silence and the Sublime in Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy, of The Ruin on the Rock (Sue Chapin) 6. ‘In Mute Extacy’: Communing with history and nature in Mary Shelley’s Valperga (Rachel Woolley) 7. Taking Possession – Romantic Naming in Wordsworth and Southey (Carol Bolton) 8. Singing the Sofa: Mansfield Park and William Cowper (Bharat Tandon) 9. Breaking ‘the Silent Sabbath of the Grave’: Charlotte Smith’s Quiet Gaze at Grief (Amy Billone) 10. Retold Tales and Structured Silences in The Excursion (Sally Bushell) "
Romanticism, Hermeneutics and the Crisis of the Human Sciences, 2016
"This collection of essays by researchers on both sides of the Atlantic is centered on a sin... more "This collection of essays by researchers on both sides of the Atlantic is centered on a single theme capable of two main interpretations. First, it is concerned with the role of silence, the sublime and the transcendental. Secondly, it investigates silence as exclusion, suppression and censorship. It offers fresh readings of a wide variety of literary works, from Shelley to Eliza Fenwick. Table of Contents Table of contents: Foreword; Preface by Michael O’Neill; Introduction 1. Mont Blanc’s Revolutionary ‘Voice’: Shelley and the Discourse on the Sublime (Cian Duffy) 2. ‘[W]hate’er these words cannot express’: Transgressive Fictions in Shelley’s ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,’ ‘To a Skylark,” and ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (Mark Sandy) 3. The Existential Crisis in the Silence of Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Scott Masson 4. The ‘Achievements of Genius’: Silence and Female Literary Originality (Fiona Price) 5. Speaking of Dread: Silence and the Sublime in Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy, of The Ruin on the Rock (Sue Chapin) 6. ‘In Mute Extacy’: Communing with history and nature in Mary Shelley’s Valperga (Rachel Woolley) 7. Taking Possession – Romantic Naming in Wordsworth and Southey (Carol Bolton) 8. Singing the Sofa: Mansfield Park and William Cowper (Bharat Tandon) 9. Breaking ‘the Silent Sabbath of the Grave’: Charlotte Smith’s Quiet Gaze at Grief (Amy Billone) 10. Retold Tales and Structured Silences in The Excursion (Sally Bushell) "
Romanticism, Hermeneutics and the Crisis of the Human Sciences